The Travelers Tarot
My New Cartomancy System
Greetings, Beloved:
I have been writing my new book, Black Power and Black Magic/k (forthcoming Llewelyn Worldwide. Duncan, 2026), discerning a real loud and almost impossible-to-ignore call to return to church as a leader, most likely lay, doing educational and organizational work locally. Pretty damn busy and I can’t tell you half of what I’m up to yet.
While all that was happening, my mind decided it was time to finish a system of Tarot I had been working on for a few years. Now, I know this is a constant refrain from me, but the truth is that in my most highly creative moments when inspiration is at my fingertips and the muses scream in my ear, I usually get a whole other project to come to me.
The Travelers Tarot isn’t like that. I mean the urge to make some sample copies and to write about why I made my system of tarot came to me amid probably the most important book of my life, but the Travelers Tarot itself, the inspiration, the visions, the images I have made samples of with graphic design1 software are not what I want, but pretty damn close.
The sample decks are to pay for an artist I am negotiating with so we can use these mock-up images as the basis for the cards themselves. To be clear, my hope is for the cards to be mostly in the form you see them now, but I have an artist I think will completely capture the spirit of my work. Their style and art will take these things to an almost interdimensional level of weirdness.
For the record, this deck is weird.
It is an almost complete rejection of the urge to remix, remake, and rely on the very reliable system of Pamela Coleman and AE Waite. Not because I don’t think their system or the symbols they created in the minor arcana, which continue to this day to be a gift to the world.
The innovation of creating a system that still allowed for those who practiced cartomancy to peek into the fortune, future, and destiny of others by reaffirming the old French system and keeping what we now call the Major Arcana but allowing the everyday practitioner to learn to predict the patterns of their own lives with the Minor Arcana. Symbols are much more focused on the everyday lives of people. From the young man in the Staves, you can follow through his whole journey to fiery power or the stony and grim realities the poor, merchant and working class often faced in the Pentacles and life.
Earth and earthbound life is interpreted through AE’s remarkable yet privileged mind and frankly tainted by his theft of a woman’s work. Pamela Coleman would be lost to us all if she wasn’t smart enough as an artist to draw herself into the deck. She is the High Priestess card.
My point is that while you and I have profited much from these symbols, archetypes, and ways of re-arranging the sacred story inside us all, I understand the rash of new tarot systems that have burst onto the scene from my view in the last few decades. What we call modern tarot is just that. A project that centered on modernity and all of its projects while making threadbare claims to the ancient world. Prica Theologica, or claims to supra mystical understanding and teaching embedded by ancient teachers in the world. The ontology of teleology. This is the idea that we are moving towards some future point, that there is some sort of societal awakening just on the horizon. That humanity is always progressing. The original meaning of being a “progressive” is simply that history, culture, and time itself are in this ever-forward flowing direction. For a long time, the worlds of theoretical and experimental physics, and later quantum foundation work2 agreed with this assessment.
I have never felt that things were moving towards some utopian version of humanity that would justify what we experience today. I have always believed that things were much more malleable, mysterious, and wild. Time, destiny, magic/k, grace, and the Divine’s place in it all seemed, to my perceptions, less set in stone, or that history was inexorably tumbling towards an eschaton.
Event. No, the visions I had of tomorrow, heaven on earth, of a world that seemed ephemeral yet so close were frankly different.
The Travelers Tarot is based on the stories, visions, characters, and magic/kal system my first teacher, James Vincent Diminaco, gave me. Much more firmly planted in the shapes and outlines of his brand of hermetic magic/k than I would ever be, he found my much more hoodoo, African philosophical, ontological, and black futurism approach to the same books, stories, and teachers as fun as I found his walk through life. I spent several summers on and off the Grateful Dead3 tour just walking by his side and imagining, or rather re-imagining, a lot of the answers to questions many practitioners have asked themselves. What if the old orders aren’t lying in their accounts of the invisible college and Hermes Trimigustius? What if you could not only “astral travel”4 or rather journey not just to some imagined Summerland but forward and backward in space-time? What if the gods still walked among us? What are you to do with a life you swear you have lived before? Is magic/k as described by the ancients still possible, or was it for well-to-do, well-heeled lodge members somewhere we would never be?
The Travelers Tarot is a swirl of those stories, theories, dear friends, family, and places put into a narrative system. What makes it different is that it not only allows one to “look” at their current situation, but if the land, space, or circumstances are optimal to the question they are asking the cards. So while most Tarot systems reflect one’s spiritual status or to peek into the past and the future, the Travelers Tarot takes into account the land or space one is standing on. It might be the right time to do something, but are you in the literal right place?
So, a deck that treats time as non-linear and treats the universe we are in as space-time. Or for a more esoteric understanding: a deck that makes sure of the land and place or energies you need to do a thing, or if you are in a dangerous place or space to do something. Perhaps I spend too much time on the road, but predicting the shape of things to come or what I must do in the coming days is always a little easier than the question, am I in the right place to do this?
The deck has also re-imagined the numbers or numerology of the Tarot. It consists of 12 Voice cards, 24 Witness cards, and 7 World cards.
The 12 Voices are what some would call the Major Arcana. The 12 Voices are messenger beings who have been left with the responsibility of caring for Earth, which is a portal to 7 Worlds. Some of these worlds are alive, some are dead, some are easily accessible, some are to be avoided, and some are possibly our only hope, according to the 12 Voices.
Each Voice has 2 Witnesses, and they consist of the 24 Witnesses of how, why, where, or what gave power to the voices. Some are friendly to their Voice. Some stalk their Voice. Some seek to destroy their Voice. Some are just brokenness and chaos in the universe personified. Some are beings and people in the wrong place at the wrong time now pulled into a cosmic drama.
The 7 Worlds are the worlds the Earth has access to. Or passes through. Or it is the Earth at different stages of maturity, depending on which Voice or Witness you believe.
A typical layout is three cards from the pool of Voices and Witnesses. Then one World card.
If a Voice is paired with both their Witnesses, this changes the meaning of the reading.
The left card is what’s happening in your earthbound, daily life. The left-hand path is sensation, pleasure, pain, and the results we see in our lives.
The middle card is what you are currently experiencing, or what Voice or Witness walks with you.
The right card is what your emotional, spiritual, and magic/kal part of you is experiencing. The right-hand path of going inward.
The World card is where you stand. Take that literally, figuratively, or spiritually.
Over the next few weeks, I will release a card or two every few days and the explanation of said cards. That starts today and is below.
I will also put up a link for pre-orders right now. This will get you a copy of this very early deck, help fund the artist I want to hire, and put you first in line for the finalized deck. Once I have 50 orders, I will send the first batch.
The Herald was born in the first world home. They died on its first perfect day. The Herald is the first to activate the cycle, the one who re-awakens their fellow Voices to who they are. The Herald’s very being was designed in a way that any incarnation they experience, any earth, any iteration of life, reminds them of who they are. Who they always are. Each life.
Their creator, whom the herald names “She Who Once Sat on the Throne” has moved on to birth another 7 worlds, and something similar to what we call life on earth. The Herald walks the path between worlds that have been left to the care of Her Voices. It is the Herald who will awaken to their strange place in the cosmos as they pass through the world in awe, full of joy, and spreading an infectious giddiness about life on Earth. This energy seeding slowly awakens the other voices to who they are even if they never meet the herald, as is often the case. The herald came to earth to trade in sensation and experiences. So they experience at times the deep sorrow the solitary life of traveling between the worlds sometimes requires. They grieve those they lost, and they also grieve those who never got to be, those whom this world was too cruel to experience and thus were kept home.
When the Herald comes up in a reading, the cycle has reached a climax. You may experience it as the beginning or end of a life cycle, an energetic shift, or the beginning of a long journey, typically in a life given to divinities or powers beyond you. Or perhaps, like the herald, it is time for you to just be. be you. Be the most balanced and authentic you. That's the key to the locked door in front of you. The Herald also asks: when was the last time you had a good orgasm? Danced until your legs were weak?
If you paired with their Witnesses, the Seamstress and the Tear in the Night, and the World card you are looking for comes up, then you are in the right place at the right time to start, end, or awaken new things and people in your life. The door to this “world” is open, and this is the place where a new journey begins, or it starts over depending on your perspective.
I did use premade graphics, some AI sketch software, and other resources. All thought of, put together by my ideas, and as you will see, it wasn’t me asking Chat GPT to remix the Ride Waite. This is an almost complete rejection of that system, and a hearken to old ways.
Often called in popular media quantum mechanics.
When it actually was the Grateful Dead.
What stupid term to be in the public square this long.